Men of Private Practice

Private Practice takes Grey's Anatomy's Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh) and places her in a wellness center in L.A. Joining her are some new doctors, many of them men from action shows. Either their characters were killed off or the shows were, but Taye Diggs, Tim Daly, Chris Lowell and Paul Adelstein are now slowing down for the drama.

New, Male Doctors of Private Practice

"It's kind of an actor's dream to play an extremist like that, and I felt in very good hands. I felt like my character was in very good hands on Prison Break," said Adelstein. "I feel like it wrapped up well. Then to go from those hands into Shonda [Rhimes]'s hands is pretty special. It's a different kind of journey but it's a completely different character. You don't pick by genre. You pick by character if you get to pick at all. This is not a pick situation. This is a no brainer. This is being called to play in the big leagues and it's just a joy. So to have to do that switch or to get to do that switch, to do it in such good, capable hands, you feel very safe and you feel like you can really take a swing at it. I'm just going to keep using sports analogies."

Chris Lowell got the job before Veronica Mars got the axe. "I had signed on for a year for one season with Veronica Mars so I wasn't sure if they were going to be bringing be back, and I don't think they were even sure," said Lowell. "Then there I was on top of it whether or not the show was going to. So I had started looking at some other projects. Then when this came along, I obviously didn't want to let it pass me by. So I went in for it and we were shooting the last episode when I got the phone call."

Daly didn't even know what show he was hired for. "For me, everything was top secret," said Daly. "I met with Shonda and [coproducer] Betsy [Beers] and they said, 'We can tell you a little bit about your character but we can't tell you what the show is or who's going to be on it or what it's going to be.' So it was sort of a great leap of faith. But when you do a series and you're looking at something that seems like it will be a surefire pickup, you want to look to your progenitors, the people who created you, to know that they can sustain something and not just create a script. So I don't know about anybody else, but I started watching a lot of Grey's Anatomy episodes and I thought, 'Okay, this is going to be great. Then of course I bothered them to show me pages which eventually they did after I had already said yes."